Wights' Fortress
The '''Wights' Fortress '''is a structure in Devil's Acre. It is the headquarters of the antagonists of the Peculiar Children series: Wights and Hollowgast. It was emptied at the end of Library of Souls as its former inhabitants had been either killed or captured. Description It is described as a "long wall of white stone, and beyond that, a high pale tower". From this, it can be inferred that the fortress is made up of a tall tower encased within a wall. The room in the Argentina Room is hidden by a pair of crossed firs. It was spartan, there are no furnishings, no poppy-laced wallpaper; and the floor and walls were smooth concrete. One of the walls has a small recessed handle. Inside, a wide curving hall of stone, hospital clean and blindingly bright, its smooth walls toothed with tall, black, tomblike doors, dozens of them curving away sharply. The hallway spirals downward. Inside one is a steaming jungle echoing with the screams of monkeys, and another opens into an adobe room, beyond which lay hard-packed ground and looming mountains. The floor levels and the hallway straightens. Around the last bend was a pair of double doors with daylight gleaming beneath them. The courtyard was surrounded on three sides by low-slung buildings, each more or less identical to the next. One building on the left, there was a large room suffocatingly packed with what looked and smelled like secondhand clothes. An aisle lined with racks of clothes of every description, from all different time periods and cultures, all labeled and organized. A wardrobe, perhaps, for every loop the wights had infiltrated. Inside the building on the other side of the courtyard, a small white-tiled laboratory that smelled strongly of chemicals, a cabinet filled with terrifying surgical tools, all steely and shining, and the dissonant heartbeat of machines. A courtyard within the walls had near identical "low-slung buildings". The first room was a small operating theater, the table armed with straps and restraints. Porcelain tubs along the walls stood ready to collect drained fluids. Next was a research area where tiny skulls and other bones are connected to electrical equipment and gauges. The walls were papered in Polaroids documenting experiments conducted on animals. In the next room, an actual, ongoing experiment was taking place. The test subjects were stretched between two tables, newspapers spread below them to catch drips. The next room was wide and open like a hospital ward. Twenty or more beds were chained to the walls, and peculiars, adults and children alike, were strapped into the beds. None appeared conscious. Needles and tubes snaked from the soles of their feet to bags that were filling slowly with black liquid. On the wall, camouflaged in the tile floor, a handle and the square outline of a hatch door. A set of metal spiral into the darkness and leads to the underground chamber, a mostly lightless dungeon walled in rough rock. The dungeon has a long, subterranean hallway lined with cells. It was used to house the peculiars under Miss Peregrine's care and also, all the ymbrynes. The bars were thick as bricks and made of something stronger than iron. On the other side of the door was a long rectangular room cluttered with utilitarian furniture and lit from above by greenish fluorescent bulbs. The wall was spongy with foam soundproofing. The door was thick enough to withstand a nuclear blast. A bulky filing cabinet blocks the view of the far end of the room. A rack mounted to a wall held hundreds of glass beakers, silver-flecked black liquid spinning inside, each labeled with the names of the victims whose souls they contained printed in small type. Behind the file cabinet, a desk with papers and random body parts and anatomy on it. A skinned arm with musculature exposed, a spine hung like a trophy on the wall, a few bloodless organs scattered like lost puzzle pieces on the desk. The room next door is where the ymbrynes were being held. Behind it was a second wall made of thick glass, which looked into an expansive room engulfed in shadow. The room is jumbled with furnishings and heavy drapes and human forms frozen in strange postures, many of which appeared, like the spare parts on Warren’s desk, to have been stripped of their skin. Most of the figures were just dummies; mannequins or anatomical models of some kind, posed like statues with their tendons and muscles all flexed and popping. But in among them, gagged, bound to chairs and wooden posts, flinching and squeezing their eyes shut against the sudden light, were the captured ymbrynes. This seemed to be Caul’s lab, torture chamber, and storage closet all in one. A torso on a table. There a head in a liquid-filled jar, its eyes and mouth agape, almost certainly real but not of recent vintage. Entry From the front entrance, wights and their cargo cross a half-made bridge through the help of a hollowgast. The second entrance is through the Argentina Room, a loop within Myron Bentham's Panloopticon in his house. This is the route that Jacob Portman and Emma Bloom used to get in. Library of Souls The fortress is first mentioned when Jacob, Emma and Addison successfully reach the foot of the Wights' Bridge. Category:Locations